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Sunday, September 21, 2014

I was only vaguely familiar with the elevator
incident and the subsequent uproar over the measly two-day suspension because I
don’t follow football. But it was a trending topic in my news feed, so I
clicked on the video.

Shocked and horrified by what
I saw, did not make me stop watching. I viewed the video in its entirety. As I
followed the story, it hit me that I had actively participated in the re-victimization
of Janay. I was what Sandra Hawkins Diaz described as a “voyeuristic bystander
“to Janay’s abuse. And I didn’t have to be. I didn’t gain anything from
clicking on the video. I’ve witnessed intimate partner violence a few times in
my life, and each time I was sickened by what I saw. I always called the
police.

Once a young woman was trying
to run away, and I allowed her to seek refuge in my house until the police
arrived. It was a harrowing experience because her boyfriend was a gang banger,
and they were standing outside of my apartment building trying to figure out
which apartment she went into. A week later, I saw her with her abuser at the
movies. I looked at her, shook my head, but didn’t say anything. I was mad that
I had allowed her drama to cross my doorstep, and she was back with him. I
would later learn that it takes an average of 6 or 7 times before the abused
can leave their abuser.

I’m not in a position to question
why anyone stays in a relationship. What the final straw is for me is not the
final straw for someone else and vice-versa. Years ago, I was reading a book
about he down low, and the author explained that women can be financially bound
to accept certain things that other women who are no financially dependent don’t
have to accept. It was a an eye opener for me because prior to him breaking
down the role that finances play in domestic situations, I just didn’t
understand why women stayed with men who were not good for them. I control my
purse strings, so I have more leverage than a woman who does not.

Age and experience are
teaching me to seek understanding more, and to judge less. I still have work to
do, but I am moving in the right direction. It’s challenging to be in the
world, but not of the world, but it’s not impossible. Because everybody else
does it, is never a reason to take part in something that is morally wrong to
me. Regardless of what goes on around me, I have to draw my own line in the
sand that I won’t cross. And clicking on violent videos of assaults, fights
etc. are not something that I need to see.

In her article, Why You
Shouldn’t Watch the Ray Rice Video, Diaz raises the question: “Why would we
want to watch a woman be violated, humiliated, devalued, brutalized and abused?”
It wasn’t necessary for me to view the
video to understand what took place. But like so many others, I allowed a
morbid sense of curiosity to cloud my better judgment. Hannah Giorgis, writing
for The Guardian said, “That we feel entitled (and excited) to be entranced by
the looks of domestic violence speaks not only about the man who battered her,
but also about we who engage in parasitic rapture. We click and consume and
carry on.”

As an African-American woman
in America, I understand public consumption. Our bodies have never been ours to
own. From day one, we have been disrespected and disregarded in every way
possible. We are not recognized as valued members of the human race. Our
culture favors rich and powerful men, and this case is no different. It’s
money, not morals that makes the world turn. The NFL’s actions were more about
damage control than genuine concern for its player or his wife. It’s disturbing
how many people have judged this situation on money. There are those who feel
that the penalty of being fired and banned is too steep a price to pay
especially since his “gold digging” fiancé at the time married him a month
later. It’s always about the money, and that’s pretty damn sad.

The spotlight maybe on the NFL
and its mishandling of the incident, but this is bigger than the black-eye on
the NFL for which it will recover. This is a gut-wrenching punch to our
collective consciousness and the way we handle intimate partner violence. Our
moral compass is awry. Too often we are willing to overlook certain things involving
money and/or celebrities, and we are just lacking in our basic compassion for
humanity. We are gawkers and vultures of all things displayed in a public
stage. We don’t even pretend to look away when we know that by looking we don’t
have anything to gain.

According to statistics, 1.3
million women are victims of domestic violence every year and a disportinate
number of them are African-American women. One in four women will be a victim
in her life time, so these means that most of us have been touched by intimate
partner violence in some way: we are the abused; we know the abused; we know
the abusers. And yet we stand in a glass house and throw stones in this
situation.

What happened in the elevator
was terrible, and what’s even more terrifying is that too many of believe that
we have a right to watch how things went down. I am owning up to my wrong doing,
and I deeply regret that I participated in an act of disrespect of a battered woman’s
body especially a woman of color who has no rights that the world respects. There
is no excuse for that.

Sunday, September 7, 2014

When I was growing up “gay” meant happy, and homosexual people were dykes and
sissies. Though they were described as “funny” there was no humor in the plight
of people on the wrong side of the sexual track. We live in a world of binaries—Black
or White, Gay or Straight etc. with no room for anything in between. And what I’ve
also learned over the years is that these divisions also denote the degree of acceptability
and define what is considered the norm.

I confess: I didn't know much about gay people. There were
no struggling or openly gay people in my family, and if I had any gay friends,
I didn’t know it. So, what I knew about homosexuality was from a distance.
There was my childhood friend's flamboyant uncle with the blonde Afro who
taught us how to really twirl a sparkler on the 4th of July holiday.
He would grab a lighted sparkler and twirl it while gyrating his hips, and he
would tell us, “You twist it this way and you twist it that way.” He was funny—really!
Then there were the whispered rumors of the gay boys in high school.
Homosexuals existed on the fringes of my heterosexual life, so I never really
gave much thought to what it meant to be anything other than straight in a
culture steeped in homophobia.

In college, all of that changed. The head of the journalism
department at my school was gay. I remember snickering at the scarves that he
tied around his neck and speculating about his sexuality. It had nothing to do
with him as a person, but everything to do with my narrow perspective. One day he
invited some speakers to one of our classes to talk to us about gay and lesbian
rights. I remember this young White woman sharing her story with us. She said
that when she came out to her parents they disowned her. This woman--who I didn’t
know—changed my life. I am from a close-knit family, and I could not imagine
cutting myself off from any of them because of their sexuality.

As long as gay people stay in the closet, straight people
don’t care. But as soon as the door opens and they step out or are forced out,
we have a problem. Straight people's problem with gay people is what they do
sexually. Straight people want to be voyeurs in the lives of gay people, but we
want to believe there’s something wrong with them; I’m confused. When it is
revealed that a famous person is gay, it’s still news. And when a gay person
does something for the first time, it’s news. Why? Gay people have been around
since the beginning of time, and we’re still acting like any sexuality other
than heterosexuality is brand new.

Lately, I keep finding myself engaging in conversations
about homosexuality that are getting under my skin. I met a guy online and we
were talking about youth, and the conversation meandered its way around to
their sexuality, and he said he would not accept his child telling him he or
she was gay. I told him that in my experience as a teacher of adolescents, I
didn’t see as a choice. He, a student of theology, told me that he could show
it to me in scripture, and I told him not to bother. We never made it out on a
date because he said I was feisty—a trait that men find undesirable. (That’s another post!)

The family of a gay man in Tampa, Florida had his funeral
abruptly canceled when the minister of the hosting church found out that the man
was gay. The minister of the church preaches against homosexuality. The recent
hoopla around, Michael Sam, the NFL’s first openly gay football player is ridiculous.
The stories of rampant homophobia still exist in the 21st century,
and that’s our shame.

I’m tired of Christians trying to prove to me that gay
people are on the express elevator to hell. From my limited understanding of
the Bible, if it’s sin that sends us to hell, I know a whole bunch a people
waiting for the same elevator, and they’re not gay. Gay people did not fall out
of the sky; they were not created in a lab experiment. They are our family and
friends. They are our co-workers and neighbors. They belong to us.

In the book Sexual Healing one of the characters is
trying to explain his changing sexuality to his ex-wife, and he says sexuality
is fluid. That has stayed with me over the years. We evolve as people, but we
think sexuality is stagnant. How is that? I’ve never had so sex so good that it
would make me turn away from my family or my church or anything else of major
importance in my life. So, when that woman talked about being disowned by
her family, I knew that sexuality is so much bigger than sex!

I don’t know why people are gay any more than I know why
they’re Black or brown or tall or short. It’s just a part of who they are. I
knew then that if I ever learned that someone I loved was gay, I wouldn’t love
them any less. And I don’t. Gay people are no longer on the fringes of my life,
but an integral part of my circle of life. Being straight doesn’t give me the
right to tell anyone who to love or how to love. Heterosexism and privilege are
real, so to help me keep mine in check, I try and remember these five points:

1. What two consenting
adults do is none of my business.

2. I don't need to speculate on anyone's sexuality. If I don't wonder who's straight,
why do I need to know who’s gay?

3. Gay and pedophiles
are not one in the same. There are plenty of heterosexual perverts harming
children.

4. Gay people are not
people who were hurt in straight relationships. If that were the case, there
wouldn't be in heteretosexual people left in the world.

5. If homosexuality is
a flaw of some sort, who among us is flawless?

Religious conviction is not a justification
for the mistreatment of anyone. Treating people with dignity and respect is
ALWAYS the right thing to do.

Saturday, September 6, 2014

Lately,
I’ve been thinking about how often we climb aboard the short bus of
relationships. Many of us like to believe that we're smart. And in most areas
of our life, we are. But we can lose any sense of sanity when it comes to love relationships.
We're on the short bus because we need extra special attention. Our brains become
rewired or even unwired when it comes to Love, Lust and Like. Something happens,
and we can't sort out what appears to be obvious to everybody else. So, we have
to climb aboard, take a seat and learn the lesson that we couldn't otherwise
get. Periodically, this blog will take a short bus ride. So, settle in and
weigh in on the lessons learned on the short bus of relationships.

When I was 15, I met a boy. He was gorgeous. He had big,
liquid brown eyes that pulled you into his him. And into him was where I wanted
to be. He wanted to date me and me him. But there was one problem: my no
nonsense mother had already told me I could not date until I turned 16 which
was only months away in real time but an eternity in my 15 year-old mind! What
was a lust struck teenager supposed to do? So, I begged and pleaded with my
middle sister to intervene on my behalf. Of my three sisters, she was my best
ally. If anyone could reason with my mother on my behalf, it was her. My sister
talked to my mother and she relented. Yes! I could date. And, the good-looking
guy with the mesmerizing brown eyes became mine.

We were the same age which meant he didn’t drive. So, “dating”
consisted of him coming over to my house every Saturday and us sitting in the
front room watching TV. He was the first boy I kissed up against the wall in
the hall. One Saturday, I got my mother to allow us to go on a date to the
movies. It wasn’t really a date, date. It was a group of friends going to the
show, and she was ok with that. There were four friends—me, my guy, my friend
and his friend. And I had to talk my friend into going because without her,
nothing was happening.

Life was good! I had a boyfriend and we progressed from
kissing to groping and grinding, then I pumped my breaks. I liked him a lot,
but I liked living even better! I was taking a risk kissing on her couch, so
you know nothing else was happening. I had pulled off the amazing feat of
having a boyfriend before the appointed time, so I was not going to take a
chance of getting on my mother’s bad side. He didn’t pressure me, so I thought
things were fine. Wrong!

One Saturday, he showed up with a hickey on his neck! And that son of a biscuit eater didn’t
even try to hide it. Since he was MY boyfriend and he had a passion mark on his
neck and I didn't put it there--I was never into broadcasting my business or
marking territory so that wasn't my thing (giving or getting)--we had to have THE
TALK. The weird thing is I don’t remember much except seeing the hickey and
having my feelings hurt that MY beautiful, brown-eyed boyfriend CHEATED on me.
What’s especially funny to me is that the hickey wasn’t a deal breaker. I
didn’t put him out of my house or break up the relationship. I “punished” him
by actually making him watch TV. I have thought about that incident over the
years, and to this day I don’t know why his behavior was acceptable to me. But
what I have learned is that it was the first of many rides on the short bus of
relationships.

I thought by talking it out that I was being mature. I'm not the one to scream
and yell in relationships. It wasn't my thing at 16, and it’s not my thing as
an adult. I prefer peace to drama any day. But my “maturity” doesn’t make me any less
stupid. Sometimes those of us with the most intellect are the absolute worse
when it comes to navigating relationships. What happens is people tell us we're
smart and they seek our advice, and we're actually good at rationalizing and
analyzing everyone else's relationship drama. But we fail to realize that
rational thought is run over by the wheels of the bus when it comes to affairs
of OUR hearts. And that’s when we know the short bus is parked in front of our
house waiting for us. Have you ever taken a ride on the short bus of
relationships? Do share in the comments section. I’d love to hear.